Lena Dunham says she cheated on Jack Antonoff during their relationship, revisiting the breakup in her forthcoming memoir, Famesick. The 39-year-old writer and actor says the split with Antonoff, whom she dated from 2012 to 2017, was already fraying when her chronic pain and endometriosis treatment pushed things to a breaking point.
In the book, Dunham says their worst fight came in the weeks before a planned hysterectomy, when she had become increasingly dependent on pain medication. She says Antonoff reacted by angrily flushing all her pills down the toilet, forcing a call to the doctor and a late-night trip to the pharmacy so she would not go into withdrawal overnight. Dunham says he spoke to her in ways she had never been spoken to, and that later that night she sought comfort from an old school friend and slept with him.
The memoir is also Dunham's first public response to years of rumors that Antonoff had been unfaithful with singer Lorde. She writes, “I wasn't paying attention, but the internet sure was,” and addresses a breakup that had already ended years before the book's publication. At the time, the allegations about Antonoff and Lorde were denied by both parties.
Both have since moved on. Dunham married British-Peruvian musician Luis Felber in September 2021, and Antonoff married actor Margaret Qualley in August 2023. But Famesick recasts a relationship that lasted five years as something messier than nostalgia usually allows: a love story shadowed by illness, conflict and betrayal, with Dunham now saying the story she is telling is the one she did not write when it was happening.
